Conference Presentations by Lise Kapper
Institutionalized Anarchy – Facilitating the Co-Creative Process
How to facilitate anarchy within the museum institution? A critical study of the inclusive practi... more How to facilitate anarchy within the museum institution? A critical study of the inclusive practice and process employed in creating the co-created exhibition “Space Invaders Over Brandts”.
This work examines the co-creative process, focusing on the cooperation between the Danish Media Museum and three volunteers before, during, and after the exhibition and event project “Space Invaders over Brandts”. Project design was undertaken using the co-creative process described by Nina Simon in her book “The Participatory Museum.” The project was defined, internally and externally, as a user-driven project based on volunteers´ visions and interpretations of the Commodore 64 computer scene in the 1980s.
Based on the research done in relation to this project, this work aims to uncover the museum's user practices and to discuss questions raised by these practices: How should the institution handle a group of highly knowledgeable, anarchistic individuals who lack experience in exhibition design? And how should the museum scaffold their work in order to preserve their anarchist approach? In addition, the inclusive process itself raises some questions: Who does the museum invite to interpret media history from the recent past? Will the result of this inclusive process resonate with a wider group of visitors? And how should the museum manage the knowledge produced by this process?
Hacking the collection: The creative destruction of deaccessioned museum objects
Many museums abide by the convention of ‘do not touch!’ in regard to their collections. Media tec... more Many museums abide by the convention of ‘do not touch!’ in regard to their collections. Media technologies are thus displayed behind glass as “black boxes” revealing only the design of their surface, which is often their least significant feature.
What if visitors were allowed to split open the mahogany and Bakelite cases of vintage radios and telephones? What would they learn upon discovering the intestines of these media technologies? Perhaps even reassembling these technologies in new constellations through creative destruction?
This paper presents findings from a recent Hackathon event at the Media Museum in Odense, Denmark. Here deaccessioned objects from the museum’s collection were hacked and reassembled into new interactive installations by an interaction designer and his team of young boys with an affinity for electronics. The museums role as facilitator of participatory processes is discussed both in relation to the touted ideals of the participatory museum and the actual outcome of the project.
We argue that the creative destruction of museum objects offers participants a unique opportunity for tangible experiences resulting in diverse kinds of learning. Including visitors as co-creators of the museum experience in this way creates a deeper and more meaningful relationship between the participants and the museum. Building on the interest in the practice of modding, such an event offers the museum an opportunity to reach out to a specialist community and take advantage of their skills and knowledge in creating new exhibition content for the benefit of regular museum visitors. We propose that such a practice can create new value for the museum, analogous with the process of creative destruction proposed by economist Joseph Schumpeter where the old economic structure is destroyed to make room for a new one.
Beyond the Museal Aura: Hands-on Engagements with Vintage Media Technologies
When placed in a museum, a thing is removed from its social context and every day practice and is... more When placed in a museum, a thing is removed from its social context and every day practice and is turned into an autonomous auratic object (Henning 2006, Witcomb 2002). This change – a transformation from social context to exhibition context – imbues the object with a new set of complex meanings involving the framing of the space and visitor engagement. A result of this is that objects generate meaning not through their embeddedness in a social context, but through their representation in the museum.
Consequently, the representation of objects as exhibits has been of great interest in museum studies the last few decades (Clifford 1997, Bennett T. 1995, Hooper-Greenhill 1992). Concurrently, in recent years, post-humanistic research fields such as new materialism and object oriented ontology has shown a renewed interest in objects as more than a mere representation of human agency, arguing that objects engage in forms of relations and show signs of agency in and of themselves. Thus, these new fields of research reexamine the relationship between objects and subject, between human and non-human materials (Bennett J. 2010, Harman 2011). Another point of interest in this “materialistic turn” is media archaeology, which aims at using “dead media” in terms of extinct and forgotten media technologies to challenge the established narratives of media history (Huhtamo & Parikka 2011, Ernst 2013).
Using the MediaArch Lab, located at the Media Museum in Odense, Denmark as case study, this paper aims at linking museology, posthumanism and media archaeology, focusing on the triadic relationship between user, object and context by examining the process of interaction between media objects, the museum space, and the museum visitor.
The MediaArch Lab (which plans to open on March 31 2017) is an open laboratory containing older media technologies such as VCRs, double deck boomboxes and gaming computers such as Commodore 64. These are placed on open shelves and on workbenches, so the visitor is free to choose any media object and examine how it operates. This setting is designed to let visitors interact with older media technologies and record his or her findings, if desired.
By analyzing data derived from these visitor records, as well as data derived from interviews with visitors and observational studies in the MediaArch Lab, this case study will revolve around the question of whether it is possible or not to “liberate” objects from the established museal narratives and let visitors reflect on media objects and their embedded agency.
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Conference Presentations by Lise Kapper
This work examines the co-creative process, focusing on the cooperation between the Danish Media Museum and three volunteers before, during, and after the exhibition and event project “Space Invaders over Brandts”. Project design was undertaken using the co-creative process described by Nina Simon in her book “The Participatory Museum.” The project was defined, internally and externally, as a user-driven project based on volunteers´ visions and interpretations of the Commodore 64 computer scene in the 1980s.
Based on the research done in relation to this project, this work aims to uncover the museum's user practices and to discuss questions raised by these practices: How should the institution handle a group of highly knowledgeable, anarchistic individuals who lack experience in exhibition design? And how should the museum scaffold their work in order to preserve their anarchist approach? In addition, the inclusive process itself raises some questions: Who does the museum invite to interpret media history from the recent past? Will the result of this inclusive process resonate with a wider group of visitors? And how should the museum manage the knowledge produced by this process?
What if visitors were allowed to split open the mahogany and Bakelite cases of vintage radios and telephones? What would they learn upon discovering the intestines of these media technologies? Perhaps even reassembling these technologies in new constellations through creative destruction?
This paper presents findings from a recent Hackathon event at the Media Museum in Odense, Denmark. Here deaccessioned objects from the museum’s collection were hacked and reassembled into new interactive installations by an interaction designer and his team of young boys with an affinity for electronics. The museums role as facilitator of participatory processes is discussed both in relation to the touted ideals of the participatory museum and the actual outcome of the project.
We argue that the creative destruction of museum objects offers participants a unique opportunity for tangible experiences resulting in diverse kinds of learning. Including visitors as co-creators of the museum experience in this way creates a deeper and more meaningful relationship between the participants and the museum. Building on the interest in the practice of modding, such an event offers the museum an opportunity to reach out to a specialist community and take advantage of their skills and knowledge in creating new exhibition content for the benefit of regular museum visitors. We propose that such a practice can create new value for the museum, analogous with the process of creative destruction proposed by economist Joseph Schumpeter where the old economic structure is destroyed to make room for a new one.
Consequently, the representation of objects as exhibits has been of great interest in museum studies the last few decades (Clifford 1997, Bennett T. 1995, Hooper-Greenhill 1992). Concurrently, in recent years, post-humanistic research fields such as new materialism and object oriented ontology has shown a renewed interest in objects as more than a mere representation of human agency, arguing that objects engage in forms of relations and show signs of agency in and of themselves. Thus, these new fields of research reexamine the relationship between objects and subject, between human and non-human materials (Bennett J. 2010, Harman 2011). Another point of interest in this “materialistic turn” is media archaeology, which aims at using “dead media” in terms of extinct and forgotten media technologies to challenge the established narratives of media history (Huhtamo & Parikka 2011, Ernst 2013).
Using the MediaArch Lab, located at the Media Museum in Odense, Denmark as case study, this paper aims at linking museology, posthumanism and media archaeology, focusing on the triadic relationship between user, object and context by examining the process of interaction between media objects, the museum space, and the museum visitor.
The MediaArch Lab (which plans to open on March 31 2017) is an open laboratory containing older media technologies such as VCRs, double deck boomboxes and gaming computers such as Commodore 64. These are placed on open shelves and on workbenches, so the visitor is free to choose any media object and examine how it operates. This setting is designed to let visitors interact with older media technologies and record his or her findings, if desired.
By analyzing data derived from these visitor records, as well as data derived from interviews with visitors and observational studies in the MediaArch Lab, this case study will revolve around the question of whether it is possible or not to “liberate” objects from the established museal narratives and let visitors reflect on media objects and their embedded agency.